If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

If you cannot do someone any good: don't do them any harm....
As long as you did this to one of these, the least of my little ones............you did it unto Me.
What profiteth a man if he gains the entire World at the expense of his immortal soul?

I get quite a few with lots of spy/ad ware on them (kids with P2P and the like ) I find it easier to use the tools then HJT to sort out the rest.

Too lazy to remove over a hundred by hand

Cheers

If you cannot do someone any good: don't do them any harm....
As long as you did this to one of these, the least of my little ones............you did it unto Me.
What profiteth a man if he gains the entire World at the expense of his immortal soul?

It could be that your ISP really f*ked up their DNS entries. Or maybe implemented an IP-range block for AltaVista's IP block. I know for a fact that my ISP is really slow at updating their DNS entries and they also implement specific IP blocks. Like I can't visit my highschool's website from home and I can't visit my home server from my highschool. Although with proxies I can do so no problem. I'm going to complain to them about it some time soon...

Anyways, to see if the address is being resolved, you should try Ping-ing altavista. The Ping is a level 8 ICMP packet that contains a random string (usually "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP" that repeats for the length indicated) and that gets a reply of the same random string from the destination computer. (The ping of death that is mentioned on the main page recently is just a ping that has an illegally long random string of over 65500 characters that some computers don't have the ability to deal with)

Open up Command Prompt on your compter by going to Start -&gt; Run -&gt; Type in "CMD" (For Windows XP/2K/NT) -- a black box should appear. Type in the bolded parts:

You should get an IP address that is similar to mine above. If you get some sort of message like "Request timed out." then something is blocking your attempts to connect. Like your computer's firewall or your ISP's firewall. If you get "Unknown host www.altavista.com." then your ISP's DNS is messed up. You'd need to find another DNS server to use, or you could edit your hosts file to point to the IP I have above.

I'm posting my log file because though I've perused it, I cannot see anything in there that screams "I should not be here!" And so I am asking for some help in deteriming what is illegal and should be removed.

Previously (to running HijackThis) I had downloaded and run Spybot and Adaware SE but I still could not access AltaVista.

Jeez Guys and Gals I am such a novice I did not even realize there was a second page counselling me against HijackThis. Anyhow, no harm done. All I did was run it. I have not changed a thing. Just posted my log. I am now going to read the rest of your advice and see if I can progress on that. Will let you know how I get on.

Please note that I have repeatedly run Spybot and Adaware SE from Lavasoft. Must be a hundred times (or close) - and it has not helped my problem.

I've downloaded and run the following to no avail. They found nothing expect Spybot keeps finding the 5 DSO Exploit thingies which I've read are no issue.
Adaware
Spybot
Swatit
CWShredder

I also unistalled and reinstalled Norton and run it.
It found nothing.

I've run HijackThis and cannot say that I see anything dangerous (not that I would know), anyhow I posted my logfile to you for advice.

No, I cannot access altavista from any site/direction/route, not even the last suggested possibility which was http://66.94.229.254

I appear to be able to access all other sites except AltaVista.

Time_Axe suggested that my ISP could have interfered with AltaVista's DNS entries. Though I do not quite understand what this means, I find that strange since I was originally able to access AltaVista using the very same ISP.

Tim_Axe sent me some stuff to type to "ping" altavista. I am not clear as to what I must type in. (DOES IT START FROM?) C:\Documents
(AND END AT?) C:\Documents and Settings\UserName&gt;

Do I type in all the stuff in between? Could I just copy and paste the text into the black box that Tim_Axe says should appear when I am going to ping this thing? (and thus avoid mistakes?)

Just want you to know that it's really great to have the support even if I haven't solved the problem...yet. I almost threw the laptop through the window yesterday before subscribing to this forum.
Thanx!
Carla

Also, could you just post the contents of your C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts file (just open it in notepad and copy/paste it here), that's one possibility that hasn't been checked.
Cheers,
cgkanchi

So, I guess we're into one of those other issues you referred to.
As suggested, I've also posted the contents of my C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts file
Comments?

# Copyright (c) 1993-1999 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host